Airborne takes off

Los Angeles TimesCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Mikel Jollett, lead singer of the fast-breaking band the Airborne Toxic Event, is aware of his reputation for darkness. He's earned it through songs such as "Happiness Is Overrated," a harder-rocking take on the Smiths, or the gloomy breakup song "Sometime Around Midnight."

"I keep getting stuff about, 'These songs are about these terrible things that happened,' " said Jollett, 34. "But I don't know if my life is any darker than anyone else's. I really just think that there's something about catharsis, and taking some of your worst moments and trying to find the beauty in them. There's almost a defiance in that."

From the moment Jollett picked up his guitar in 2006, things began moving quite fast.

The band's demo -- recorded in his apartment soon after recruiting the group's other four members -- became a hit on MySpace with the help of an enthusiastic Rolling Stone write-up.

The group had no label, no manager, no publicist and a baffling moniker (from a bureaucratic term in Don DeLillo's 1985 comic novel "White Noise"). But when the song showed up on influential L.A. radio station KROQ, industry types started sniffing around.

"The phone just started ringing off the hook," said Jollett, whose work as a writer included occasional pop music stories for the L.A. Times. "And every single cliche about the record industry is true. People offering you drugs, telling you how famous they can make you, how much you need them in order for it to happen, how if you don't do X, Y and Z, it's not gonna happen."

They ended up, with their record already recorded at a friend's studio, going with Majordomo, an L.A. indie that includes Earlimart on its roster.

Things seem to be coming together for the band. As it moves from the often insular world of indie fandom into the rock mainstream, Airborne could make even the considerable success of Silversun Pickups look minor.

But Jollett still jokes about his life's sudden crises and his almost involuntary switch to music.

"Right now, I should have my second novel and a 1-year-old kid," he says. "Instead I'm playing at seedy clubs with these jokers."

Happiness, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder.

"It's really absurd sometimes," he says. "When we're playing, all that stuff goes away, it feels completely natural. This is what I was meant to do."